


The French Book

by Martha



Category: Arthurian Legend
Genre: Multi, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2004, recipient:mistykasumi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-08
Updated: 2011-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-14 13:59:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/149922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Martha/pseuds/Martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love was not then as it is now-a-days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The French Book

Prologue

Sir Launcelot departed and took his sword under his arm, and so he passed till he came to the king's chamber, and then Sir Launcelot was lightly put into the chamber. And then, as the French book saith, King Arthur and Launcelot were together. And whether they were abed or at other manner of disports, me list not hereof make no mention, for love at that time was not as it is now-a-days.

But thus as they were together, there came Mordred, with twelve knights with him of the Round Table, and Mordred said with crying voice: Traitor-King, now art thou taken.

Alas, said Arthur to Launcelot. Now are we mischieved both.

* * *

They'd been kids together, Arthur and Morgan le Fey. Ector had raised them as cousins even though they were brother and sister, and he'd had his reasons, for while it was one thing to be known as the daughter of Queen Ygraine, it was quite another to be Ygraine's male heir. The entire countryside was still a shambles in those days, claimed first by this petty king and then by that one, and once Merlin started gadding about to proclaim that the son of Ygraine and Uther would one day rule all of Britain, any hint that such a child already existed would have been the death of Arthur.

So Ector made damned sure no such hint ever arose. Arthur survived his childhood, and as Morgan was passing fair, and loved Arthur well, it shouldn't have surprised anyone when she began to wax greater and greater, and seeing her condition, Arthur asked permission of Ector to marry.

Ever a practical man, Ector wasted no time bemoaning the unfortunate nuisance of young love, but simply set Morgan packing to the castle of King Uriens of the land of Gore, that was Sir Ewain le Blanchemain's father.

Arthur grieved for a time, but soon enough politics distracted him from a disappointed love life. He removed the sword from the stone before the high altar in St. Paul's while Morgan was in confinement at Gore, and then overcame the false kings who met him to do him despite at Pentecost in the city of Carlion, and around the time when the young Arthur was proclaimed king of all Britain, Morgan was delivered of a boy with hair as black and eyes as blue as his father's. When Ector heard of it, he sent word to Morgan that she would know the truth of her son Mordred's heritage and put him away to spare her shame.

But Morgan kept her own counsel and continued to nourish the babe at her pap, and after the boy was weaned, she and her ladies journeyed to King Arthur's court. They traveled three days and three nights until they came to the lands around Carlion and then, as the day was warm, and the ladies grew weary in the heat, Morgan and her company stopped in the shade of a spreading oak tree and raised a pavilion above the green grass. Morgan gave the safekeeping of her son to her lady-in-waiting and laid herself down to sleep.

But as she slept she dreamed, and she saw herself standing upon the shore of a violent sea, and approaching over the waves was a vessel which bore the bier of a king.

When Morgan awoke, she was passing heavy of her dream. She found her ladies still asleep and she arose, hearing sounds in the forest as if the waves were crashing still. As she followed deeper into the wood she heard, not the crash of waves on the shore, but of armor clashing against armor. Anon she came to a clearing and the clamor of steel ceased. And when she looked she saw two knights struggling together, though not to do one another harm, for they had cast aside helm and hauberk, gorget and breastplate, sword and shield, and they embraced one another as lusty knights. The one was hight Sir Gawain, who had great worship for his prowess with the sword and for his loyalty to the king, and he was clad in but a shift. The other that he embraced and kissed was naked as a babe, and when Morgan saw his black hair and blue eyes and knew him for Arthur, she turned aside, as the French book saith, and returned lightly through the woods where she bade her ladies to arise and take Mordred to Carlion, to be raised in Arthur's court as befit his noble blood.

But Morgan le Fey returned to her childhood home, and Ector put her to school in a nunnery where she learned so much that she became a great clerk of necromancy. After, she was wedded to King Uriens of Gore, and in Gore she continued to read, and she learned what usefulness all the herbs bear so that she might cure sick bodies. Also, it was whispered, she knew the art by which she could change shape and cut the air on new wings in the manner of Daedalus, and whether that be true or no, she received often word of Mordred's growth and nourishment, and of the diverse doings at court.

The Christmas after Arthur removed to Camelot with all his knights and lords and noblemen-at-arms, Mordred was but five, and that was the year the Green Knight came to Arthur's court with a challenge for the king. Sir Gawain, ever jealous for his lord's honor, did accept the challenge in Arthur's stead. He swung a dolorous stroke, but great was the Court's dismay when the green man simply plucked up his own severed head by the hair and solemnly adjured Gawain to come to the Green Chapel in a year's time to receive a return blow.

During the doleful year that followed Arthur and Gawain were never parted, and oft one or the other had tears in his eyes for grief over the coming Christmastide, when Gawain would bare his own fair throat to the Green Knight's axe.

The whole Court and all its estates had sore woe when Gawain left to find the Green Chapel and his own death, but to the wonder of all he returned after the New Year, though many observed he was a different knight now, and he was as melancholy as a once-prideful man who now carried a great shame, and it was said that he never came more to the king's bedchamber.

Because it might easily be seen by Mordred's blue eyes and black hair that he was the king's son, and because Queen Morgan came never to court, it was even said that Morgan herself had sent the Green Knight to shame Gawain and the king. But Morgan kept her own counsel and remained in Gore.

When Mordred was fifteen years old, a young squire came to Camelot and desired to be made a knight, and because he was brother of the good knight Sir Lamorak, Arthur granted his request. And anon Arthur was roused from his long melancholia by the beauty of his newest knight, and bade Sir Percival to sit at his right side. Ere long the court gossip pronounced Arthur more light of heart than he had been since before the coming of the Green Knight, lo these ten years gone, and indeed it was so, for Sir Percival was a worshipful knight and acquitted himself to the king's honor at tourney and quest.

But alas for the king and for Camelot, because soon enough came the dolorous years of the Grail Quest, that began in such pious good hopes and ended in such unholy bloodshed, the land ravaged, the people struck down by hunger and disease. Hundreds of good knights were laid low by the sword or their own shortcomings, for innocent foibles in court proved deadly in the pitiless quest for Christ.

Sir Gawain's quest for the Green Chapel had brake that good knight's pride, but the Grail Quest broke bodies and damned souls. And what came of it? Those who were pure of heart and found the Grail in the end never returned to Camelot. Percival himself, whose bright eye and smooth cheek the king had come to love so well, quitted Arthur's bed, was confessed and shriven and men say that he saw the Grail maidens and the blood of Christ pouring from the sacred vessel, and indeed it may have been so, for he never returned to the king's side, and was seen no more in Britain for the rest of Arthur's days.

After the Grail Quest a great darkness descended on Arthur, and he was seldom at court, that once-boyish king who long ago had taken such delight in the jests and stories that filled the hall on feast days, and when Mordred was twenty-five and declared openly his desire for the succession, Arthur, as one oblivious to his own danger, married the Lady Guinevere, and she was barely twelve years old.

When that news came to Gore, Morgan knew she would never go to Camelot. Her husband King Uriens died soon thereafter. He was a very old man, but it was whispered that Morgan had poisoned him, and she took herself and traveled to the Fortunate Isles and from thence she never returned.

In Camelot the child-bride Guinevere was taught by Merlin and by the other wise men of the kingdom, and before she was sixteen she had begun to assume the responsibilities of rule that the king had treated but lightly since the dark days of the Grail Quest. Under her hand the old ways of honor and trial by joust began to give way to a code of law, as had governed folk in olden times. Too young to remember the Grail Quest or the Green Knight's challenge, she judged such things only by the heavy brow and long silences of her king and husband, and thought it all a pity and a waste and truly, Arthur could not tell her nay.

So it was under Guinevere's hand that peace came at last to Britain, and the healing of the land brought a measure of healing to Arthur's heart. He asked Guinevere if she desired children, and when she told him nay, he kissed her fair brow and quitted the queen's chamber for the first and last time. It was in those days that Sir Launcelot, the king's steady companion from the days when the court had first come to Camelot, would sit with his king in the eventide, and many a time the two warriors could be seen, gray haired from their years wielding spear and sword, walking hand in hand through the castle grounds with their voices low as they remembered the honors and sorrows of olden days.

But Mordred was busy to secure his own succession, declaring to all who would listen and many who would not that it was a great shame that Britain should be ruled by a child while the court turned a blind eye to the king's dalliance, and in time he found some to back his claim, mostly cranky old men who remembered the glory of old battles but not the suffering and who chafed under the weight of peace. Bolstered by this dubious support, one baleful evening Mordred burst in upon the king's bedchamber, and found Arthur and Launcelot abed together. Launcelot's head lay upon Arthur's shoulder as Arthur read aloud from an old romance about the noble knights and ladies from the time of Troy, and Mordred shouted with a crying voice so that all the court might hear, "Traitor-King, now art thou taken!"

"Don't be an idiot," quoth Arthur. "And put away that sword."

But Mordred smote the king a dolorous stroke, and Arthur fell across the white bedclothes, his blood redder than roses. Then did Gawain gave a cry of rage and struck Mordred's head from his shoulders as lightly as he had once beheaded the Green Knight.

When Guinevere came at last to the king's chamber she found a scene of such dole she must needs weep, for Arthur lay swooning in the arms of Gawain and Launcelot, and those two good knights stinted not to let their tears of grief flow down their faces.

Guinevere knelt and touched the king's pale brow and did say, "You must take him to the Queen Morgan le Fey of the Fortunate Isle, for surely she may heal him, for the love that she bears him."

"My lady we dare not," quoth Launcelot. "She is a necromancer and has always born ill-will to Camelot and now her son hath slain my good king." Here, the tears came anew to Launcelot's eyes.

But Guinevere shook her head and ran her fingers through the king's curling black locks, so thickly streaked now with silver, and she tried to imagine herself in love with the strange man who had been her husband for six years, and when she considered the grief of Gawain and Launcelot she said again, "Take my king to the Fortunate Isles and I know the Lady will surely cure him, for the love she has of him."

So to that place Gawain and Launcelot brought Arthur, with Barinthus leading them, to whom the waters and the stars of the sky were known. With that guide for their raft, they came to the Fortunate Isle, and with what was fitting Morgan le Fey did honor to them, and in her rooms she placed the king upon a golden couch and with her own honorable hand she uncovered his wound and inspected it for a long time. She bethought herself of the laughing young man who sought to wed when he wot she was heavy with child, and of the end that had come to the son of her youth.

And at last she said that health could return to him, and therefore, with sore longing, they committed Arthur's care to her.

Now the French book saith that Arthur did not survive his wound, and his corpse was born away by three Queens, and the one was Queen Morgan le Fey, the other was the Queen of Northgalis, and the third was the Queen of the Waste Lands, and they laid him in a chapel by Glastonbury, and there Sir Bedivere became a hermit and prayed for his lord Arthur the rest of his days.

But again, you yourself may find Arthur sitting on a bench near the kitchen garden at Camelot on a warm summer evening, with Gawain on his left side and Launcelot on his right, the three of them list to enjoy the sweet smell of rosemary and sage crushed under their feet, and either one of those good knights and even their lord would smile and tell you not to believe everything you read in books.

* * *

Text sources and actual quotations taken liberally from _Vita Merlini_ (Geoffrey of Monmouth) -- I used Emily Rebekah Huber's translation -- _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_ , and principally of course, the _Morte Darthur_. The University of Virginia's E-Text Center has the 1903 edition (Caxton's edition with modern spellings) online.


End file.
